It’s been a while. Nearly two years ago, the Canary was forced to cut down its coverage. This came at exactly the time our work was most needed. It meant the class war at home and the ‘forever wars’ overseas couldn’t be covered as deeply they should have been. That starts to change again today.
This work is vital. Of course, these two kinds of conflict are never truly separate. By some estimates we have up to 10 million hungry people in the UK yet we have a £66bn war budget for 2025/2026.
What is new is that the wars abroad and the war at home are merging in new and terrifying ways.
The explosive situation we face today is a result of a long political and economic decline in the west, certainly. That decline was already being felt in the US over two decades ago. The American response was to cynically use 9/11 to launch a series of disastrous wars. The British government of the day chose to stumble along behind George Bush. There is no question today that those wars have come home to roost.
There were warnings even then. On 21 September 2001, Stop the War Coalition was founded. Their foundational statement from that year reads:
any war will simply add to the numbers of innocent dead, cause untold suffering, political and economic instability on a global scale, increase racism and result in attacks on civil liberties.
Maybe this was a relatively easy prediction, maybe not. But their assessment was pretty damned accurate, wasn’t it? And in 2025 we can see that that dystopian vision uncoiling before our eyes.
Delusion or fabrication?
We’d be fools to ignore the echoes of post 9/11 practices like rendition and shadow detention camps in recent projects like the Rwanda deportation scheme and ‘Alligator Alcatraz’. Clear examples of how the forever wars fed into the class wars. Because it’s workers, not their bosses, crammed into cages in America’s sweltering south.
Increasing mass surveillance, the rise of far-right politics globally and, more locally, the British state’s use of police counter-terror powers against non-violent critics of foreign policy are also partly products of the wars.
This process finds its latest culmination in what is too often called Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I say ‘too often’ because it isn’t just Israel’s genocide – it’s Britain’s too. Israel has been directly supported by successive British governments.
Of course, there’s a lot of denialism among the establishment even if it is wearing a bit thin. A few weeks ago, I saw an example so flimsy that I laughed out loud.
A (superbly-named) former army colonel Hamish de Bretton Gordon told the billionaire-owned Daily Mail:
Whatever people think about what’s happening in Palestine, it’s nothing to do with the British military.
He was talking about a ban on military equipment at an armed forces day event in Yorkshire. But the fact the press allow such absolute garbage be published unchallenged is part of the problem. In fact, it’s such a deliriously inaccurate take that it’s hard to tell if de Bretton Gordon was being disingenuous or ignorant. It takes all of about three minutes on a search engine to find the truth.
For example, our friends at Declassified UK’s have reported on British forces’ active involvement in surveillance operations over Gaza, and on the Israeli soldiers who’ve been trained in the UK. That is without mentioning the D Notice which is allegedly in place regarding UK Special Forces operations in Palestine.
The UK military, the British state and the British arms trade – if we even consider these as separate entities – are up to their necks in genocidal killing. The fact that the failing Starmer government have rejected recent calls to come clean on the surveillance flights suggests they know it full well.
The lesson is that the survival of a “loyal little Ulster” in the Middle East is more important to the British establishment than Palestinian life. And its definitely more important than the liberties of citizens here at home.
Forever wars are home to roost
Now I’m not exactly the chairman of the Tony Blair Fan Club, but to my knowledge he never arrested Iraq War protestors en masse. The current situation tells us at least two things.
One is that Starmer is – or has ended up – far to the political right of Blair. For some of us, the Labour Party’s authoritarian urges were clear long ago. They certainly can’t be ignored now that they are being realised at scale. A dorky centrist creed emerged under 14 years of Conservative rule which ended at insisting ‘anybody but the Tories’ should govern. It should never be heard again. This kind of performative waffle isn’t going to cut it anymore.
The other thing is that the so-called ‘imperial boomerang’ has landed back at in Britain with a jackboot thud. This isn’t entirely new, rather it is an acceleration and expansion of processes that were already underway.
The domestic backlash of the War on Terror has been felt for a very long time. It was just that for the first twenty years, the victims were mostly Muslims. The current program of repression is a new mutation of that process.
The imperial boomerang concept, originated by the anti-colonialist writer Aime Cezaire, described the way methods and technologies of repression developed in the colonies come home to the colonizing nation.
Hannah Arendt, analyst of the old totalitarian ideologies of Naziism and Stalinism, broadly agreed with Cezaire. So did the cultural theorist Michel Foucault, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Today we see the boomerang expressed everywhere. In the violent repression of Palestine protest in Germany; in the rise of ICE, Trump’s personal fascist militia, in the US; and in the general turn around the world to what the scholar Gilbert Achcar recently called a new age of neo-fascism.
Blood and sand
The rise of far-right ‘disaster nationalism’ is deeply related to the doom loop cycle of decline at home and war abroad. But the far-right won’t bear the brunt of state repression. The Home Office has proscribed Palestine Action. The police have dragged away pensioners as they protest genocide. Yet the current UKIP leader can throw up Roman salutes unmolested?
If fascism is more tolerable to those in power than anti-war activism, it is precisely because very little about fascism misaligns with empire.
And let’s not forget that the anti-migrant rhetoric Farage trades off is steeped in the anti-Muslim bigotry generated by and for the wars – the same ideology invoked by migrant hotel ‘protestors’.
While self-appointed ‘journalist’ and friend of Israel Tommy Robinson was carried to fame leading the backlash against poppy burnings by a tiny clique of equally far-right idiots during a homecoming parade. Both of these figures, and the movement they represent, were shaped by the wars.
We are reaping the whirlwind of decades of war, of a US empire in crisis and of an economic system which can no longer hold together. We might have some say in what we get next, but that will take serious work.
That effort must include building an independent, uncompromising and adversarial media, It must be committed to the democratic values which a real fighting press – and real fighting journalists – are meant to advance.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.